AFL Victoria releases control of local women’s leagues, will create more football jobs

AFL Victoria will no longer directly control all women’s leagues in the state, creating more footy jobs.Source: Getty Images

A LANDFALL of jobs will be created next year, with AFL Victoria set to decentralise their role overseeing women’s footy in Victoria.

AFL Victoria has been associated with the Victoria Women’s Football League since its inception in 1981, and has been responsible for the management of the league since 2013.

But the explosion of the game in the last four years has led to the decision to hand over power to local leagues. AFL Victoria expects up to 150 women’s teams to operate in 2017 in Victoria, up from 32 teams in 2013. In essence, the VWFL competition as we know it has come to its conclusion.

With the exception of the VFL Women’s competition, every other league will be run locally.

Female Football Talent Manager for AFL Victoria and AFL Tasmania Darren Flanigan told foxfooty.com.au more jobs would be created locally to meet the new demands in 2017.

“Every community and metropolitan league will have a women’s competition or competitions and most of the leagues are adding extra staff to their workforce in either club development or footy operations to pick up the workload,” Flanigan said.

Not only will more jobs be created, but leagues will operate in a manner that aligns with the local men’s competitions.

“It means — like the local men’s leagues that are dealing with local clubs, government and ground — they can include female football in their portfolio,” Flanigan said.

“It makes it a lot easier to manage and a lot easier to develop because they’re dealing with people on a regular basis.”

While there were murmurings of disappointment on social media that AFL Victoria’s relationship with women’s footy was ending, Flanigan said the move was inevitable.

“We thought it would be about 2019 or 2020 when it would get too big for us to handle at AFL Victoria,” he said.

“But we expect there to be 150 teams next year, which would just be impossible for us to manage.

“There’s a massive appetite for it in community leagues so it ended up being a perfect storm. The clubs we’ve spoken to are all okay with it. It happened in youth girls a number of years ago so we’re just going on from that.”